The Spies in Salt: Movie Gallery

The filmmakers behind Salt, out July 23, say they wanted their spy movie to be fun and realistic. Just how close did they get? We talk to experts to find out.

Jul 19, 2010

The filmmakers behind Salt, out July 23, say they wanted their spy movie to be fun and realistic. Just how close did they get? We talk to experts to find out.

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In Salt, Angelina Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The actress spent time with real CIA agents, both in deep cover and retired, to research her role. "We spent a lot of time with different people who’d worked in Russia House and the CIA," she says."I think the biggest note I took from them was how isolated and lonely they felt not being able to talk about their life and their work with anybody in their family. And what a sacrifice that is. That informed a lot."

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Salt was originally conceived as a vehicle for Tom Cruise; when he turned it down, the spy became a woman, and Jolie stepped up to play her. The most important thing was, we said we can’t turn this into a girl movie, because that’s where, I think, people have failed in the past, Jolie says. When they write something on purpose for a woman it’s always about being a woman, using your femininity, all these kind of female obvious things. So we said let’s just keep all the things about it that are tough. If anything, we have to make it darker and we have to make it meaner than the boys.

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Salt isn't Liev Schriber's first time playing a CIA agent. In addition to playing one in The Sum of All Fears, Schriber narrated a film called the History of the CIA. "There was this rude awakening about how the CIA has controlled a lot of critical foreign policy for years in many ways" he says. "But I was intrigued by was the fact that the average CIA operative was not ex-military or special forces or in anyway lethal looking or James Bond-y. The average CIA agent looked more like Aldrich Ames than they did Daniel Craig. That was interesting to me because it turns out most of them are analysts. They’re language students, poly-sci students, who selected through an elaborate process. But then I met Valerie [Plame] and I was like, va va voom! I found out Valerie had extensive weapons training and extensive combat training and I was like, I guess I was wrong. You’re not all nerds."

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Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays FBI agent Peabody in Salt, loved finding out about the CIA for his role. "I thought it was fascinating," he says. "It was one of the areas I was really interested in when I was looking at the film. I was very fortunate to speak to people who were very open about, not necessarily operations, but certainly the bureaucracy and the inter-departmental ideas of the CIA. And where the tensions can arise between counter-intelligence and agents in the field."

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Chiwetel Ejiofor as "Peabody" in Columbia Pictures' Salt.

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Has Jolie changed at all since Philip Noyce directed her 10 years ago in The Bone Collector, when she was a relative unknown? "When she was young she didn’t know any better," he says. "So she was fearless of trying anything, doing anything story-wise, character-wise, shot-wise, anything—[and] she didn’t lose [that]. She hasn't become conservative, not an ounce. If anything, success has given her more fearlessness in every way."

"I laughed through that whole scene," Jolie says of the sequence where Salt builds an improvised explosive device. "I felt like making MacGuyver music."

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"All of the actors had prototypes they worked with," Noyce says. "Angelina spent a day interviewing spies who were gathered for her by the CIA and we sat in a room and looked at them on television, many of them in deep cover, who were helpful up to a point, but because they still were in deep cover they couldn’t answer most of the questions. But then we found a lot of ex-spies who did answer all of the questions. The object [was for the audience] to invest in the characters and the outcome, which is particularly important given the way your allegiance to the central character is going to be tested by her actions and the accusations that are made against her. She’s always on the point of losing her allegiance, because you're thinking, 'She’s bad. I should not be supporting her.' But at the same, you got to keep supporting her. So therefore we tried to make the characters and the technical details as real as possible so you could say, 'I believe this, I’m with her.'"

"I think he loves detail and story," Jolie says of Noyce. "I think sometimes people just love explosions where they move very fast through action. Philip and Simon both really want to understand, you know, when we would go through the White House, where’s the box and how would you actually get in, and all the different grids of what was real and would this make sense. Such precision and such detail that nobody would even know, to make it absolutely accurate. And I think that helps the story because somehow it’s just closer to reality and it’s just more believable and therefore you accept it more. And I think that’s why his films work. There’s a real intelligence behind them, and yet a great sense of fun."

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Jolie's longtime stunt coordinator, Simon Crane, tweaked the fight sequences to make them more realistic. "He’s just a genius," she says. "It was him really trying to figure out, okay, if she’s going to go up against a guy who’s a foot and a half taller than her and a hundred pounds heavier than her, how could she actually do it? And then there was a lot of really slow discussion about it. She’s faster, she can get height, she can jump on things, or she’s quicker, or she’s more agile. Everything had to be somehow possible, even if it was stretched, even if the trucks on the freeway were wild. I think that was our bar – could it be done? It’s the opposite of actually every action movie I’ve ever done, because there’s never really been a female action movie based in reality. They’re always fantasy. I’ve done most of 'em."

If all goes well, Jolie is game for a Salt sequel. "The question now is it depends on how it goes," she says. "So if it does, then we’re all going to jump in and try to figure that out. It’s more like we’ve been joking now, kind of like could there be a disaster in every resort across the Americas, across like Europe and the world, you know can we go to Fiji for no reason? I’m going to start with a list of locations, and then I’m going to figure out the story."

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Jolie is famous for doing many of her own stunts, and Salt was no exception—something that made Noyce nervous. "She has a long relationship with [stunt coordinator] Simon Crane," Noyce says. "That relationship was nerve wracking for me because he knows her so well and he is also such a skilled coordinator; and they have a team a of safety people and harness people, and rigs and things that fly her in and out like cirque du soleil that she has great faith in. The fact that she did want to do all of these things and could do them meant that we were able to hopefully construct action sequences that were a little more real. It's all her."

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